Creativity Tools
by SebKus
Summary: A series of drabbles of various lengths detailing the details of a summer--both before and during--that marks the final breath in a song of youth.
1. Weather Guessing

Weather Guessing

Roxas was a junkie for the rush that one feels when terrible expectations are lifted when the truth of the moment comes to light. Case in point: he had his clock set two hours fast and woke up every morning to the initial dread that eight thirty brings, only to bask in near orgasmic delight as the actual hour dawned on him. Delicious six thirty; delicious hour of sleep remaining. So when he and Axel would lie down on the little paved road at the top of not-mount Mount Prospect and look up at the clouds, Roxas would invariably predict rain and murk and grey.

"No it's not." Axel had an arm folded over his eyes and was rolling a pebble beneath his heel.

"We'll see." Roxas was eyeing a cloud that looked suspiciously like an umbrella—until it looked like a drinking fountain—until it looked like a white blob of nothing.

The fact was that Roxas suffered from made up diseases like RLS and SAD. He endured the New England winters by alternating between ridiculous stretches and burst of tears that came at inappropriate moments like during the news or while he was boiling water. There was nothing worse than opening his eyes to see a grey sky and a grey world filled with water and dirty snow piled up to obscene heights in half the parking spots in the Wal-Mart lot.

So he had his fun predicting how terrible tomorrow would be with the rain and snow and hail and sleet and wind and cold and ice, but then tomorrow came and the pretty picture was one of spring and Axel was pounding on his back door yelling about Roxas' damn cat clawing at him and if there was any Cap'n Crunch left.


	2. Measure

Measure

Axel was the sort of artsy prick that liked to redecorate things every few years when the various shades of red and blue and green had lost some of their edge. Now a young man, the project regarding his room was coupled with a young man's salary and that meant new (rude and ostentatious) furniture. Axel, being impulsive artsy, was keen to just buy and buy and deal with things like size and the non-elasticity of wood later. But Roxas, being equally artsy but not nearly so retarded, insisted on at least a cursory examination involving a measuring tape.

So the sea of empty cans was drained away and Axel's scratched and stickered bed was dismantled and shoved out into the hall where the resident mutts nosed nervously about it. And in the intervening musty space, Roxas was itching himself on dusty carpet and tracing things like width and length out in his mind as Axel made mountain ranges out of extended tape.

Sneezing for the tenth time, but ultimately satisfied with his estimates, Roxas pushed past the two ratty dogs and yelled for Axel to remember his wallet because he wasn't paying for some shitty rainbow desk no matter how discounted the thing was. And Axel pinched his finger on the tape as he let it scream back, wondering if Roxas'd help him put the thing together and if the paint should've been done first.


	3. Incredibly Modern and Stupidly Stupid

Incredibly Modern and Stupidly Stupid

Roxas was named after the Spanish king whose villa-turned-hostel his parents had met in while backpacking in opposite directions across Europe way back way then. That is, where they fucked before leaving never to see one another again. Oh well, Mrs. Roxas was always just a little bit silly. But the memory was fond enough and once she got back to the States with a more-or-less grieving mother at her side, she gave birth to the boy in question in a quaint New England hospital. The Spanish pronunciation was done away with, however, sometime around when Roxas was two.

Axel was named after the Guns and Roses frontman to whom his mother lost her virginity, literally or otherwise was never made clear to Axel, but Mrs. Axel was never quite the catch and came across as just a little a lot shrill, so it was a safe bet that it was the music Mr. Axel was making love to rather than the wiry mess of red beneath him. And anyway, the naming went all the wrong way when the nurse responsible for getting the name down for the birth certificate wasn't familiar with the man or his band and marked the little official thing A X E L, taking Mrs. Axel to be an auto enthusiast, misspelling her non-hip misconception and shaming the name of all nurses everywhere because who the hell doesn't know Axl Rose?

Anyway, years later the two losers would meet and make nice and go through school and spend one last summer together before taking the big jump college. But that was just an excuse since they were going to the same one anyway, but who else were they supposed to do stuff with?

And sometimes Axel would give Ro-has shit about his shitty name and Ro-has would bemoan the tragedy of having both a shitty and misspelled name and Axel would remind Ro-has, knowing him to be a stupid bookfag with all the stupid definitions rolling around in his head, that tragedies always ended with people dying and what would Ro-has do without him and did he have any money and could he get his damn cat off of here 'cause it was bad enough with all the pollen.

"Señor Gato es mi amor, así que...vete a la mierda tú."


	4. Soft and Smiling

Soft and Smiling

In the square and circle moments between the bliss and lethargy of a summer sans purpose, Axel and Roxas liked to count out the bruise colored bruises they'd managed to give one another in sparkling diamond moments when they try to see just how hard they can push against the barrier that marks them as individuals. Now again, they ram each other's heads against walls and tombstones and scream obscenities at the top of not-mount Mount Prospect and hurl the other to the grass.

And later Axel takes the pain and squeezes till the juice runs shallow, zests the canvas with the rind, and explodes the thing with color and stroke.

And later Roxas dwells in the murk, shutting himself in cupboards and closets. And reveling in the throb of a leg, of a fractured rib, he sees the bruise colored words sidle along the wood paneling, and he rushes to get the best bits down on real paper in real ink because the swelling will burst, will deflate, and he'll be left---and they'll be left sweaty and soft and smiling.

And then they go again because there's pressure on the nose and wind in the trees and the little shards of mica in the road gleam in the sun like something obscene. And then they go again.


	5. A Sense of Community

A Sense of Community

The beach was a place to drown your little sister. Roxas wrote a piece about that once. She'd gone out just a little too far, dipped just a little too deep, raised her stubby little arms with her stubbly little fingers above and out, and died screaming. Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles.

Roxas didn't have a sister, though. So the beach was a pretty nice place to be sans un-nice memories and Axel bitching about the sand and the hot made it a bit better. Or a lot. Sometimes Roxas was vindictive sans reason. Because this was Massachusetts and it wasn't late summer, still early, the water was icy icy and not fit for swimming. But the breeze coming off and blowing over there, the smell of the salt and the soothe, it was enough to while a day away in a nice spot surrounded by disapproving mothers as they walked by clucking at the perch Axel and Roxas had taken on top each other.

"So I think we should have a bonfire for all our friends."

"Murder is so tacky, Axel, and burning them up is hardly subtle. We'd be caught in days. No, hours, minutes, seconds! They're on their way…! "

"Shut up. No one's gonna be here at night until the festival starts so we should take advantage."

"How many friends do we have again?"

So Axel picked sand out of his toes and fiddled with his cell until the date was set for three days from then and a crowd of something was set to show. Satisfied, he dumped Roxas' shirt on his face and flopped back on his back content to waste his time in the sun because it made Roxas happy.

And when he'd fallen asleep, Roxas did the clichéd things with sunscreen and sleeping people he'd always scoffed at in those shitty movies he secretly liked where the guy got the girl and everything floated on okay.


	6. Musings in Third Person

Musings in Third Person

"Urbane in habit, in truth, disinclined, the bad boys of CityPlace like to linger in spots where, upon an easy look, they'd be judged. And to defy expectations, to defy Roxas' bleeding docility, to defy Axel's sore ridden forearms, they were overt. Overt in how his paperbacks were dirty and creased, were underlined in blue and black and red, were aromatic in the way of worthy things; Overt in how he saw the world in shifting flashes of texture and hue, how a thought could catch in its moment of life a days worth of living, how the crush of pebbles and wish of grass was enough to fill a week transposing, a week transposing each beat of sound to rays of sight. They relished in doing such and so, in grinding the dim and unthinking faces of everyone into the stones that were the simple fact: We are special. And clinging to that simple fact, they carved out a future of creation, creating, as it were, a new world with them in it, a world where others who worried the face of the masses could see what they made and say 'Yes, yes, yes.'

"As gods, what was created was a mirror, the physicality, the touch, it was the thought, the thing to grasp with other hands that was the reflection. But hardly faithful, how these mirrors reflect their sunlight, their prayer, how an ideal, a median, a sinking hulk of a rotten limb could be shown, the whimsy of an unrestrained self, that we as men see ourselves as other, the inherent flaw in any creation, they were imperfect."

But folded against Axel in the special sort of sleepy haze that was so like a high, but more sharply focused on finding the minute crack in wall erected, erected round everything Roxas had to say, Roxas, speeching his speech, drowning them both in words unmeaning, let himself be content with things for the moment. The sunlight was bleeding everywhere; the dust, a dry mist in the light. The cat was kneading at his chest. There was the sound of footsteps at the door. And yawning, Roxas closed his eyes.


	7. Backward Steps Then

Backward Steps Then

Roxas could remember back three months, to March, April, to almost warm pressing yet frosty fingers into the spaces between windowpanes. That transient time of life, of our lives, where no one is quite sure what to do, when the mud runs still with the threat of ice, but the sun seems to last forever.

Roxas spent every eleven to eleven thirty in the library. Lunchtime wasn't a time for eating, rather, with his legs folded and contorted around a soft blue chair, Roxas wrote about how the early spring light pushed in like a cool knife, separating the two halves of some airy fruit, scattering already dry seeds on the table, and leaving everything to waste and rot.

It was with certainty that he turned away from everyone else, mouthing a greeting at the old smiling librarian as she said hello, wishing that the world were empty.

But his mind was ever on later, where, after school and three miles out, up in the cemetery on top of Mount Prospect, he'd fish his cracked and dented phone out of a pocket and call Axel, desperate to hear from him, way out there in Washington and California, touring schools that were so very far away, as testified to by every mocking map with their scaled to size fingers, pointing and laughing. America was a very long country and if Axel stretched himself across it all…

"I miss you," he'd say and listen to the crackle because his phone only worked an eighth of the time and Axel never answered anyway.

So cracking, Roxas eyed the tombstones all around, the stone bleached white with decades of acid rain, the names worn away. He wondered:

"Are tombstones our final proof of existence? They linger far longer than memories. Suppose, once you're dead, everyone who ever knew you died as well, they will, do, eventually, but stones linger and they have your name. But eventually everything is worn away and in time, the peppered granite loses the careful cut of you and is left a hulk of something, a cloudy remnant, what's left of you."

But again, in another vein, leaning against all that was left of a man named Goodwin, there are flimsier remnants that persevere longer. Documents and records, papers stacked in mounds filed away in chambers that stretch to lengths unending, dizzying and dizzying, you'd meander forever. And the digital scraps, too. Everything you said and pretended you were, all there to linger until servers fail and domains, dismantled, vanish 'neath the sludge of life e'er progressing.

But not for Goodwin.

But again again, a third vein, too obvious to be ignored any longer, the only real reason to remember anyone after they're gone, what they lived for.

"I guess that's the proof, Axel, what you leave behind, intangible, untouchable, self perpetuating and able to defend its…._ Raison d'être. _Your effect on the world, how affect everything."

How then, would Roxas be proven two hundred years out? Fear of solitude, fear of rejection, of death, they're all secondary, in Roxas' mind, to the terror that being average, that being insignificant arouses.

And with his eyes on the sky, on the pale, still-winter sky, desperate to find something, anything to touch, to reassure, to prove him for then and now, Roxas extends his hands, palms open for anything, yet they fall back dejected, rejected, and empty.


	8. His Skull Grinned Eternally Anyway

His Skull Grinned Eternally Anyway

Axel was pretty sure he was a prodigy. At least when it came to color-smacking anyway. Other things like logic and thinking and putting things together in coherence were more Roxas' field, and he was mad good at them. So…Roxas could be a genius too. But art was easier to look at, to take in in an instant. The few times Roxas had let Axel read his stuff it took him a half hour to get through it. The stuff was good, there was no doubt of that, and Axel was motivated to get to the end and think about it after, a while after, but it took time and that just wasn't his thing. So when his teachers would marvel at his drawings and paintings and say he had a lot of talent but it all seemed so rushed and fast, he'd tell them to fuck off and that if they had any real talent they wouldn't be teaching in a public school with a budget a third of what would be horrifying. So…Axel was pretty sure he was a dick, too, but he had the sense to keep those comments to himself and nod politely when they burst in his mind like popcorn.

But out west in the last land of opportunity in the Land of Opportunity, he somehow found it worse when the mouths of people he could have respected dropped a little and their artsy little minds tried to wrap around what he'd put out for them and all the little girls and boys he should have been learning from turned out to be mindless and dumb, raving about his "energy", his "energy", what the fuck? He'd dumped a month to tour his major prospects and prune his premier picks for college and it turned out that he'd been better off smacking paint at wall while some faux hippie told him to slow down and think about things differently. They were worthless and beneath him and the crushing disappointment was enough to cover up his Roxas-pining for half a day. So…Axel was desperate for a mentor.

Axel was sure that if Roxas cared enough about his deep inner feelings he'd wax poetic on how Axel was both bored with being the best and yet terrified of losing the admiration of his unders; that his drive to improve was hampered by a lack of competition, yet spurned on by a mindless and all-consuming fear of being dismissed.

So…when Axel got back to Massachusetts, burned and upset, he found Roxas more or less the same, too thin and too pale and loitering around the edges of some kind of breakdown. And way up there in the cemetery on top of Mount Prospect, next to the not-worth-much gravestone of some nobody named Goodwin, Axel spoke to Roxas' deeps and Roxas spoke to his and the whole world seemed to matter just a little less and the fact that they were special and odd and better than the rest turned into a nice comfort, a blanket they could share there, underneath a cloudy sky.

And mocking, Axel splashed some blue up there and Roxas wrote a poem so that Goodwin could, in a rotting smile, have something to laugh about. And then they went on okay. Back home for a while and then way up north in one mother's car, to New Hampshire and the mountains where they could be alone together and laugh at the echoes their voices made along a narrow open road.


End file.
